Like Crazy: Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends

Mathews (Committed), a PETA executive, lovingly and hilariously recounts sharing his Portsmouth, Va., Victorian house with Perry, his ailing 79-year-old mother. In 2008, the 46-year-old party- and travel-loving Mathews moves his manic depressive mother in, despite being hesitant about their relationship and his romantic future (“Who’ll want a frantic vegan with a bad back, a deaf mother who hears voices, and a nineteenth-century money pit with an underwater mortgage?”). But the arrangement is a joyful one for a couple years: Mathews still dates—except now it’s not party boys, but “men who love Home Depot”—and meets Jack, who’s just coming out after years of marriage and eventually joins the household. Then Perry experiences a psychotic breakdown and is treated for previously undetected schizophrenia. She eventually tells Mathews and Jack that “I have to go... I just wish I could keep going awhile longer now.” Perry, who had always dreamed of being a ballerina, dies just before Christmas 2012, and Mathews spreads her ashes in the snow outside of a local Nutcracker performance. Mathews conveys potentially heavy and gut-wrenching family crises with page-turning style and heaps of wit. This tender, beautifully written celebration of familial love will resonate with readers. (May)